Category: Flipping Problems

February just flipping sucks

2/10/2019

It is winter in New England.
As Facebook has been reminding me with "Your Memories" notifications the past few days, the past several years have brought some hefty snowstorms to this area. I have blogged earlier about the detrimental impact of snow days even though you might think that flipping would make school attendance irrelevant. Au contraire! 2019 has been nearly bereft of snow around here, while the Midwest and Northwest have suffered most of all. Last year we got slammed in March, so I am not yet declaring the end of winter.
We have 1 more week before February Vacation . That is my only full week of vacation of the entire calendar year. We go to DisneyWorld and I switch my brain off (as much as possible) as soon as we enter the taxi to the airport. I don't do any lesson planning or educational research and I have no control about timetables, transportation, or anything else for the next several days ... as a control enthusiast, I welcome the short brain break. It's really my only week off of the whole year, because I'm also productive during the summer.
However, I have to work a little extra hard before the vacation week to make sure that I have a good wrap-around plan to work for the days before & after. It doesn't help that the week after February Vacation is pockmarked by an assembly, NAEP testing, and a math placement test. Waah, waah, whine, whine, you don't really care about all that.

Without boring you, dear reader, with all the details ... here are the 3 project options I will offer students on Wednesday as we wrap up a unit about the executive & legislative branches:

I will allow students to arrange their own groups (yikes!), or pairs, or working independently. That's what Wednesday's class period will be about. I have to be flexible to account for potential snow days after the vacation week, and because some students leave early or arrive late from wherever they go. (Well, I will be absent on the Monday afterward because that's our travel day, so I can't really complain.)

The upshot is this: no flipped lessons for almost a month between the most recent one (due Tuesday Feb 5th) and whatever I assign in early-March. Is that heresy?! No, just reality.

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Sometimes I am really flipping stupid...

1/6/2019

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Last week I blogged about some new class structure ideas that I would be starting a few days later (tomorrow!):

online assessment/accountability for the flipped video lessons
opening more class time for 1:1 conferences...
...and for discussions about the concepts introduced in those videos

The stupid part of that plan is that Crystal Kirch already pioneered it with the WSQ model! It's like that idea was buried in my subconsciousness (I finally read the whole book last July) and stayed dormant until now. I actually made marks all over that book about Crystal's systems and how they compared/contrasted with mine. At the time, I was deliberately resistant to systematic changes ... but mid-winter almost always welcomes a sea change of some sort.

I will try to do something smart: Write out the step-by-step plan for how I will set up the lessons and how students will interact with the flipped videos & with each other....

I produce and upload a video into Edpuzzle with several multiple-choice questions. Those will act partly as refreshers & engagement points for the students -- and partly as stopping points that I can see on the Progress Screen in EdPuzzle, to verify students' partial completion of the task.
I will add the link for those Edpuzzle videos and several question items on the "Need2Know Responses" GoogleForm that I meticulously created today. First, I had to test and re-test to ensure that the settings ("Limit to 1 response" & "Edit after submit") will let students revisit their answers later. I also added 2 questions to help with the grading/accountability aspect [illustration above]. The response spreadsheet has conditional formatting to make the "revised", "late", and "we made a deal" items display differently for my benefit. The specific scores were carefully considered over the past several days. 100% scores will be earned through revision after the class discussions (except for maybe 1 or 2 kids who actually really did nail it the first time).
Now I think I could assign a flipped HW task with 1 day notice, but usually I will stick to 2 days. In the LMS (right now it's Schoology), I will post an assignment that just contains a link to the Need2Know Response form -- always the same form, although the old questions will be "bumped down" the list each time for students' sake. That is how I can enter the grade into the Schoology gradebook for each different flipped assignment. I need a different gradebook column for each task, but I decided that I should only have one GoogleForm for all of the responses in this unit, or else I will be going crazy clicking between forms and tabs!
Students will open the Schoology assignment, click into the GoogleForm, find the Edpuzzle link, watch & answer questions about that lesson, then write their several-sentence response to the summary question. [example below] They should also enter at least 1 curiosity / concern / confusion question. Finally, they predict their grade.

5. My turn: on the morning of the due-date, I scan the students' responses and I can quickly assign a fair grade (85% or 50%). I also plan to copy all the responses for each class section, paste them into a document (without names) and print handouts for each student. Those should help our subsequent class discussions: we can all see examples of good, bad, and ugly summaries! This is my twist on Crystal's approach to let all students see each other's GoogleForm responses.
6. Class discussion for about 20 minutes about these concepts. At appropriate moments, I could focus attention to questions that students had posed online. We will probably see some popular/common queries repeated on the handout! I expect that students who gave Incomplete (50%) responses at first will learn how to correct their misunderstandings during these conversations. Maybe not, but this seems like a good way to try. This is my approach to another element of Crystal's system: "WSQ chats"
7. Brainstorm during this afternoon's dog walk: I get a bunch of different-colored Post-It notes. Students who got a score of 50% receive one color of Post-It on their handout, and students who did not yet do it at all (0%!!) get a different color. That's a quick and easy way for me to give feedback, I think. Best of all would be if I save the last couple minutes of those discussion days for 1:1 conversations ... especially for those who got a 50% score (unless I can explain it clearly on the Post-It note).
8. Those identified students should go back to the Need2Know Response form (like I used to make them re-take part or all of their assessments for more credit) to improve their 50% scores with accurate understanding. After some more thinking, I decided that 80% should be the highest-possible retake score for a "Fine" response. The 5-point "penalty" won't really impact anybody's term grade, but it sends a message about the importance of making a solid 1st attempt and it reminds me about their previous trouble with just a glance at the gradebook. I think those students should be eligible for a 100% score, though, if the re-attempt is such high quality. Does that seem fair?

Of course I will blog about the results after I unveil this on Wednesday!

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New Year, New Flipping Systems

1/1/2019

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a screenshot of the unit overview sheet that I am also writing today

There are lots of good reasons not to change class systems in January, but sometimes you just have gotta do it. We have a stupid little 3 day re-entry week starting tomorrow, so I don't plan to pull the trigger right away. I've got a few more days to finalize and polish the plan, but it's pretty much set.
I have written elsewhere in this blog and presented at several conferences about this flipped mastery system of in-class quizzes to verify students know what they "Need2Know" before getting into the deeper stuff. Parents like it, special education staff seem to like it too, and returning students always respect it too.
Here is what I hope to gain from an assessment shake-up:

Avoid the panic of winter when snow days impact (or threaten to affect) my plans. We have 3 straight months when that's a possibility. When I have in-class quizzes, they get bumped by snow days (or, again, I might have to prepare for just in case it will happen). That always slows down my curriculum progress and momentum. If my checks for understanding are online instead of in-class, then I should get less heavily impacted by the weather ... as long as we don't lose electrical power!
Get more in-class time to work/meet with students instead of assessing them so often. It's an easy data trap to fall into: I know what they don't know...but when can I get to actually do something about that? When I spend about 1 class per week isolated from students (while they take the quiz and while I'm feverishly scoring them before the class period ends), that makes the other classes so precious. Getting more 1:1 time was supposed to be part of the point of flipping! I see that I've gotten away from that.
For this unit, I imagine having basically 2 kinds of class period. A) Start with a short video or reading together (or referencing a recent flipped lesson), then dive into class discussion for ~20 minutes, with a few minutes of debrief / reflection before the bell ... and B) mostly workshop time for an independent-choice project, which is when I get to have those 1:1 conferences. That structure is much easier to plan for than the 1/2 assessment-1/2 class activity system that I have been struggling to design effectively.
By making open-response online assessments of the flipped lesson (with Edpuzzle, GoogleForms, or Schoology), I shouldn't need to stress so much about creating videos that fit the specific quiz questions and objectives; I could also offer multiple info sources for these open-response assessments. That might lead to better and easier differentiation than I have been able to manage lately. Maybe that's why people make fun of me for how long I've spent on video production.
Finally, the upcoming government unit needs flexibility that the Need2Know system doesn't always provide. News events are changing so quickly that I need the ability to switch tomorrow from a workshop day to an article-reading/discussion day. I imagine that I can move online assessment deadlines much more smoothly than the in-class quiz dates, and that I can change the topic/focus as needed as well.

OK, those are some of the pros. I'm sure there are cons to this plan as well. That's partly why I am blogging about it today: so Future Self can see where I went wrong this week! For students who really liked and just got used to the "regular" system, this is not good news. (Of course, it might really help some kids who were struggling with the in-class quizzes!)
A big reason why I avoided the Edpuzzle-style assessment of understanding is the issue of academic honesty: How do I know these students really know it? But I've got to face it: there are flaws in the paper-pencil quiz approach as well. Kids still sometimes just cram-and-forget.
OK, I have not yet convinced myself that this is a bad idea. Sometimes that actually does happen while I'm blogging, and usually it's only the final draft that gets published -- not the series of thoughts that led me there. I trust that it's a good idea for me to be designing the unit at the same time as I'm devising this assessment change. It's not like I'm doing this in the middle of that unit! Now I better publish this post and switch gears to unit design! My vacation is so totally over....

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When you are your biggest flipping problem

9/24/2017

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"obstacles, barriers, snags, and other complications to flipping"
[topic for the September 27 livechat]

I know that I am more fortunate than some flipping colleagues: my administrators have always supported the practice, parents have never complained about it, and technology access is a minor concern in this community. (When I surveyed students in week 1 about their ability to do online assignments, 100% reported accessibility at home and/or school.)
My teaching would be a lot easier with some curriculum improvements. In this state the Social Studies Frameworks have not changed since 2001, and the district has not revised its curriculum since 2003. It's stale, overstuffed, and basically impossible...so we all mostly ignore it. Massachusetts has no formal test for history and social studies, which alleviates pressure but reduces structure and funding. 1750-1865 America feels like such a wide area with too many topics and skills for 180 days, so we have to pick and choose and make different decisions each year. That complicates my flipping because we can't always recycle videos, and because we're always curriculum unit planning as well as lesson planning.
But that's not my biggest barrier. The most diabolical complication to successful flipping is between my ears. I get in my own way like nothing else ever could. Many of The Awkward Yeti comics illustrate my internal struggles better than I could manage in paragraph form. Here are 3 particularly appropriate cartoons:

Oh yeah, the force of self-doubt is strong with this one!
My solution so far this school year may seem counter-intuitive: I spend LESS time lesson planning than I used to do. That makes me more efficient and less likely to overthink, re-design, overhaul, kvetch, and commiserate. Trying to work smarter, not harder. That will also mean simpler video production this year, as already visible in my policies & philosophies clip. Getting out of my own way feels better than my usual "why are you hitting yourself?" approach. Let's see how long this lasts!

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Looking backward & forward with 1 flipping week to go

7/24/2017

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These are some things that I wrote exactly 3 weeks ago....

How are things going so far? Meh, not bad but not great. I'm still struggling with the objectives for the colonial & "road to revolution" units. I'm thinking of a "1757 snapshot" -- the colonies 260 years ago. But when I break that down into the political, economic, social, and daily life domains it looks HUGE. At least as big as the colonial regions unit that I'm trying to replace.

<-- This tweet appeared at an opportune time.

It is true that I want my students to learn all of the things [link to original use of phrase] right away. That is probably how I partly sabotage myself every September.... Must keep in mind that most 8th-graders are not quite ready to learn the first few days and weeks! Those classes are for exposure and grabbing their interest and proving that I'm not an evil bastard. It's not about being clever, it's not the time for mega-innovation in all possible ways, and they won't necessarily appreciate the 'bread crumbs' of historical knowledge that I drop along the way this month.

Tomorrow I'm doing some more local research for the summer-work grant. Yay for $$!! Hopefully the chief researcher has found some useful items about the local figures I asked about last week. I feel like I am one diary away from total success....

Just 7 more self-imposed blog posts this month!

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February just flipping sucks

Sometimes I am really flipping stupid...

New Year, New Flipping Systems

When you are your biggest flipping problem

Looking backward & forward with 1 flipping week to go

Who is this flipping guy?!

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